Sketchfab Texturing Challenge: Classical Sculpture

What makes these sculptures masculine or feminine? How can color and texture affect the presentation of gender in ancient works of art?

Welcome to this month’s texturing challenge! This time around we’ve partnered with SMK – the National Gallery of Denmark to challenge your texturing skills and get you thinking at the same time.

The challenge is simple: consider the two sculptures embedded below as representations of gender, download and texture one or both of them according to your response. Will you double down on strong pinks and blues or opt for a subtler commentary using metalness, transparency and normal maps?

Update!

We’re amazed at the creativity, craft, and consideration the contestants have put into their texturing of Venus de Milo and The Spearbearer. It’s wonderful to see that such ancient artworks continue to inspire, across time and media! ~ The SMK Museum

SMK is the national gallery of Denmark, and our collections in the public domain belong to everyone. Recently, we started experimenting with 3D scanning sculptures and placing the high quality scans in the Public Domain. The scans are like tools in a toolbox – you can use them for all manners of purposes. That’s why we’re happy to launch this ‘texturing challenge’ with Sketchfab! We’re excited to see how y’all respond to the theme ‘Gender and Body Ideals’ when you remix and re-texture Venus de Milo and Doryphoros (The Spear Bearer). Feel free to let your imagination run wild.

TL;DR: Texture the Venus de Milo or Doryphoros using your favourite texturing workflow, upload it to Sketchfab and tag it with #StatuesTexturingChallenge. Be sure to credit SMK and link to their original model.

Rules

If you need to update the UV mapping, that’s ok.

This is a texturing challenge, no significant edits to the model geometry allowed. Retopology is OK.

Submit only new work, but feel free to submit multiple scenes.

Once you’ve created your scene, upload it to Sketchfab, tag it #StatuesTexturingChallenge.

Credit SMK Museum for their scan in your model description, and add a link back to the original by adding this Markdown code:

Based on "[Doryphoros (The Spear Bearer)](https://sketchfab.com/models/2b213f98afa742a5880af130b4d4eddc)" by [SMK – National Gallery of Denmark](https://sketchfab.com/smkmuseum), licensed under CC Attribution”

AND / OR:

Based on "[Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Milos))](https://sketchfab.com/models/53082b5d6cef4c34a9701a2a24f58075)" by [SMK – National Gallery of Denmark](https://sketchfab.com/smkmuseum), licensed under CC Attribution”